BurnedThumb

Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

Elizabeth

  • More of the same, more of the same

    Still busy with family. I went to see my mother in Liverpool, also catching up with my sister and two of my brothers. Good fun, and I slept so much while travelling I feel like a new person. It doesn’t mean there is much writing going on, however. I have been Christmassed – you know the stage where every brain cell you have left is full of presents and who is going to be home and what will they eat and defrosting the freezer.
    Also every time I turn around there seems to be something lovely that my grand-daughter would really like.

    Nevertheless. Two poems last week, one of them even finished. And the news about next year’s festivals is coming out – StAnza looks fabulous already. Usually it sneaks up on me and I find myself saying “Oh, if only I’d known last week—” Next year it will be different!
    Here is the link

  • The Creative Process

    Here is a link to an article by Alan Jamieson on the process of writing. It is thoughtful, coherent demanding, encouraging, illuminating.
    Enjoy!

  • who was Arthur

    a new twist on the King Arthur legend!

  • how not to write a ghazal

    It shouldn’t be, but to me it often is, a surprise how the form of a poem shapes its content. A sonnet, as Don Paterson says, is just the shape and length of a particular kind of thought, a proposition which I have twice found to be the case. A villanelle, if it is to work properly, has to express and sum up a really strong mood or insight, so as to stand up to all that repetition. A ballad is not only a story, but a particular kind of story that will move quickly and take the stripped down plot and the archetypal characters.
    A ghazal, as I learned at Juliet Wilson’s workshop, is a poem made up of rhymed couplets, each of which ends with the same word or phrase. The chosen phrase, I thought, would have to be quite powerful in itself, admit of considerable variation of emphasis and have to have a very simple word, easy to rhyme, before it. So this is mine:

    Going Home
    She will go back there one day, but not yet.
    She has not had long enough away, not yet.

    It will have to be soon, before things change
    so much that she will lose her way, but not yet.

    She knows she would be welcome again.
    They would even expect her to stay. Not yet.

    Has she got what she wanted from leaving?
    It is still far too soon to say. Not yet.

    But has she forgotten the places
    where the children used to play? Not yet.

    I am a lot happier about this than I was when I wrote it,but I still think it misses the point. I was looking for some driving thought, some sense of progress through the poem, and this is a form which, it seems, is inimical to that sort of thing. A ghazal is meant to be meditative, cumulative. It doesn’t matter to a ghazal where a particular couplet is placed, or if you come to a conclusion by the end. The effect it want is a timeless heaping up of image and impression and creation of mood. It seems entirely appropriate that it is usually written to express ‘longing’.

    I think I will have to start again!

  • the true and the sacred

    This is an odd week. Last Saturday I went to the Radical Book Fair in Edinburgh, and then to a poetry workshop about the Persian poetic form the Ghazal. And then it was Halloween and on Sunday it was the Feast of All Saints. So I had planned to post about ghazals on Burnedthumb, and how the cumulative meditative technique shapes the kind of subject you choose and the way you present it, and on Lúcháir I was going to post about a speaker called Joseph Murphy and his book, At the Edge, dealing with the survival of Gaelic culture in Ireland and Scotland.
    I was also, since the end of October brings together death-and-renewal celebrations in both Celtic and Christian communities, going to pay tribute to all the saints in my life, living and dead, Catholic, Protestant, Quaker, Wiccan, Buddhist, Muslims and Jews, and atheists and agnostics aligned to all kinds of compassionate philosophies. I’ve chosen which tradition I want to follow myself, but I am grateful to many others, and I consider myself very fortunate to have lived among and learned from so many interesting and gifted people.
    This has now taken on an added importance. I will be dealing with the outstanding posts on Burnedthumb and Lúcháir – next week, probably, life is pure mental just now – but there is an issue which has bugged me so many times in the last week, I just have to post about it. As it impacts both on questions of how we write and how we live together, it’s going up on both blogs.
    Recently I’ve been aware of
    Jan Moir’s poisonous and irresponsible outburst on the death of Steve Gately. As well as the unkindness of writing such stuff at a time of grief, I have issues with her irrational dismissal of the evidence from witnesses and from medical experts, in order to draw a conclusion that could not be other than hurtful
    an email being circulated asserting that the holocaust is to be removed from the British curriculum in order to pacify Muslims. It further alleged that Muslims are holocaust-deniers. I know of no basis of truth for either of these statements, and, though it was passed on to me by someone who is only concerned to make sure that the holocaust is accurately remembered, the intemperate and irresponsible language used can only stir up hatred
    the dismissal of David Nutt. Nutt seems to have been unnecessarily provocative, since the only reason ecstasy is safer than tobacco is that tobacco is 100% lethal, but on the other hand you can’t ask people to give you the facts and then, when you don’t like them, ask for some different ones.
    The stramash over Jesus Queen of Hearts. No, I haven’t seen it, but I’ve read what the author said, and when she says she is a Christian, and intended to write something that was thoughtful and to ask us to reflect deeply on the issue of trans-gender, I believe her. I don’t believe her play is blasphemous and I’m not offended by it. But. That title looks like a parody, it’s designed to grab the wrong sort of attention, and the poster is cheap and tacky and demeaning. It isn’t surprising that many Christians get the impression that the whole thing is designed to mock and degrade them. Then you add to this the pompous self-righteous stance of some of the protesters, the posturing as if we had some sort of right to authority in the matter. We don’t. We have one opinion among many. We are entitled to hold it, to express it and to live peacefully without being mocked for it, but we don’t have the right to make everyone else accept it. And finally, the whooping and cheering of the media, trying to stir up a good fight, and forgetting that at either end of this story are decent thoughtful people, acting in good faith, and hurt by the exploitation of an issue which is so dear to them.

    All these things seem very different, but in my head they have one thing in common, and that is abuse of the written word. In a free country we can think what you like, and say what you like, but once you put it into writing, you have the responsibility to make sure that what you have said conveys the message you meant, and to consider what impact it will have on those who hear it. If writers don’t write with respect for what is true and what is sacred to their readers (and everyone has something they feel is sacred), we shouldn’t be writing at all.

  • fairy tales and reinventions

    In a casual throw-away line in my previous post, I said I should maybe try a Rumpelstiltskin or Baba Yaga sequence next, and the idea has grown on me since then. The Orpheus sequence was written as a fairly androcentric one, simply because the artist/muse thing seems to be such an androcentric issue, and it helped me think about some issues in a fairly uncluttered way. After all, the guy’s side of the story is so familiar, and there was quite enough newness in what I wrote without going completely off-piste.

    Also it’s still a given in some levels of cultural thinking that male experience is normative for human. It’s quite easy to assume that artist/doctor/traveller is male, and, in liberal quarters, that women can play too, now we’re liberated. And we do, some of us. We read ‘poet’ and we identify completely with the experience and understanding and where poetry is the thing, not gender, why not? Of course Orpheus is me as much as all those guys, and I’m not pretending I don’t have some of those illusions and pretensions either.

    But sometimes the experience is different. It’s not just biology or society or circumstances. Women’s work , women’s stories, women’s maturation happen across different territory, not all of it domestic. But then domestic is also interesting is it not? I am thinking seriously about all the girl fairy-tales – not just the reinterpreted ones, but the ones where girls are always centre-stage, and marriage is not the only outcome – Vassilisa the Beautiful, Cap O’Rushes, Mother Holle. There is a lot that will bear thinking about, not only the mother-daughter relationship – I’m not convinced anyone needs to write any more about that – but sisters and neighbours and communities of women.

    This will probably take quite a while. I am planning a new stage in the lúcháir project, which involves learning a whole bunch of stuff about photo-editing and HTML that I never expected to have to deal with, and family events and politics are claiming more of my attention than usual.

    Watch out for The Wave on 5th December.

  • The Orpheus Tradition

    Someone suggested that my Eurydice Rising Sequence was so complicated and illusive that I should write a whole essay on the romance and ballad tradition, so I have. I’d be interested in comments from anyone who knows about it.

    The Orpheus Tradition

    The classical story of Orpheus is simple and well-known – Orpheus’ beloved wife is stolen by Hades, and dies. Orpheus goes to the underworld to rescue her and plays so well that he is allowed to take her back, so long as he does not look behind to see if she is following him. He does look back, and she is lost forever, and Orpheus, distraught, is killed by Maenads because he refuses to play for them. It is told in many cultures and many formats, from Boethius’ allegorical understanding of Eurydice as Soul, beguiled into Hell by the pleasures of the senses, rescued by Orpheus as Reason, but lost through his weakness and want of dedication, to Offenbach’s irreverent satire on marriage and conventional thinking, in which both Orpheus and Eurydice are glad of the opportunity to set up with someone new. Everyone seemed to have their own take on what was happening, whether like the Orphic cultists, they believed that Orpheus had established the belief in life after death, or like Ovid, that he was the first homosexual.

    What fascinated me most of all as I got to know more about the tradition, was that as the story was dispersed and retold, many versions did not end with tragedy. As the story moved north, it happened more and more that Orpheus actually got Eurydice back.

    In the Breton lai, Sir Orfeo, Orpheus is both a knight and a king of England. His wife Herodys (I did recently hear an undergraduate without any classical background pronounce Eurydice like this – it made my day) is kidnapped by the King of Fairy as she slept under an ‘ympe tree’. This is a grafted tree, distrusted because such tampering with nature was thought to be unnatural. In medieval times such a tree was believed to leave anyone who slept there vulnerable to the otherworld, and the image of a grafted tree was sometimes used, as Perdita does in A Winters Tale to symbolise a lack of integrity. Orfeo is so distraught with grief that he leaves the court and goes into the wilderness for ten years – a ritual time of trial called a ‘moniage‘ . In Moniage 1 I have referred to the best known example of moniage in medieval English literature – the obscure but charming poem Maiden on the Mor Lay.

    At the end of the ten years, Orfeo sees the a hunting party and discovers that it is the Wild Hunt (slua sidh in Irish folk tales) – the Fairy people on an expedition to the everyday world. Oddly enough, he does not recognise who these people are, but is reawakened to his own identity by remembering his former hunting days. He sees Herodys among the court, but she is not able to respond to him, and he follows the hunt into an underground world filled simultaneously with horrific visions of lost people, those dead by misadventure, or women dead in childbirth, murder victims, and lunatics – people who ‘are thought dead and are not’ – and beautiful visions of the wealth and luxury of a royal palace. He sees Herodys both sleeping under her tree, and as a queen dressed in gold at a banquet.

    Orfeo performs as a minstrel and is promised whatever he likes as a reward. When he names Herodys, the King questions his fitness to marry her, but acknowledges that he has to be bound by his word, and he places no obstacle placed in the way of Herodys’ return. When Orfeo returns to Winchester to reclaim his throne, he disguises himself as a beggar to test his steward’s loyalty, and his welcomed out of loyalty to the absent king. The story ends with both marriage and kingdom restored, and the steward rewarded.

    The Shetland ballad, King Orfeo, although similar in many ways, is a more simple ‘fairy-taken’ story which draws on the Celtic bardic tradition. The king of Ferry pierces King Orfeo’s wife Isabel with a ‘dart’ and takes her away with him. Orfeo pursues them, but they disappear, leaving only a grey stone – the traditional gateway to the other world. He plays his pipes and is invited inside. Once there he demonstrates his expertise in the three modes of music expected of a bard : Goltraighe, ‘the weeping strain’, here called ‘da notes o’ noy’; or lament, Geantriaghe, ‘the laughing strain’, here called ‘da notes o’ joy’, or dance music; and Suantraighe, and ‘the sleeping strain’ or lullaby, which the ballad describes as ‘da god gabber reel/dat meicht ha made a sick hert hale’. In Irish tradition the suantraighe makes anyone who is awake fall asleep, and anyone who is sick becomes well. He claims, and is granted Isabel as his reward, and on his return, not only his wife but his kingdom is restored to him.

    The many symbolic values encompassed by Eurydice, who represents soul, conscience, maturity, muse and social identity, as well as lover, and the different outcomes gave me a lot to play with. It gave me the opportunity to see Orpheus as many different artists – Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Thomas the Rhymer and Gerald Way from the emo-band My Chemical Romance. I could use the multi-layered tradition to examine the use of poetry – and art in general; the role of an artist in society, the way an artist integrates – or fails to integrate – the practice of his art with his personal life, the nature of love, and the very odd relationship between artist and muse. The old-fashioned exclusive language here is deliberate. Women, particularly women of my generation, negotiate this terrain differently – maybe I should try a Rumpelstiltskin or a Baba Yagar sequence next time!

    In my version, Eurydice is not dead or stolen by fairies;she is mad, and she and Orpheus are locked in a co-dependent relationship which may or may not destroy both of them. Whether either one of them gets out of hell depends on Orpheus’ willingness to come to a sound understanding of who he is, and set Eurydice free.

    This might be a good time to acknowledge the influence of my supervisor way back when I did my MLitt. Felicity J Riddy is not only a brilliant medievalist, but was also a wonderful teacher and mentor. And she wrote an essay on Sir Orfeo (The Uses of the Past in Sir Orfeo published in the Yearbook of English Studies vol6 1976) which started me on my interest in the Orpheus tradtion

  • getting criticism

    Thanks to everyone who posted such interesting comments after my Lumb Bank post. It has made me very much more conscious of the importance of good, informed and constructive criticism, not just in the early stages of beginning to write, but all through your writing life. But you don’t always need the same sort of criticism
    When you start, you really need someone in your life who will tell you your poem is brilliant, whatever it looks like. It doesn’t matter if you know they are probably wrong and in six months time you will look at it and realise how lame it is and wonder what she was thinking. You need someone to tell you how good it is or you wouldn’t write at all. It could be you, of course, so long as you believe yourself!
    Then, when you are strong enough, you need to hear how strangers read it. The workshop experience can be wonderful ,or it can be traumatic.

  • aftermath

    It seems a long time since I put anything up here, and of course it is. Family goings on, etc. have got in the way. In a large family like mine there’s always something going on, but we did have a whole swathe of people getting ill and needing attention, and I got ill myself and so it goes.
    It hasn’t all been family and dull stuff, however. My Zen folk music poem, Sean Nos was accepted by Brittle Star and will appear next week, and I’ve put together two more submissions, which I suppose will take the usual ages to feedback. When I was at Lumb Bank I got some useful background about why magazines sometimes take so long, such that frankly, sometimes you have to be grateful that they get back to you at all. And it makes those editors – Sally Evans, Joy Hendry, Louise Hooper in my experience – you may know more – who take the time to be kind and constructive, so much more to be cherished.
    Come to think of it, good, honest accurate criticism is worth its weight in gold from whatever source. I was going to give a roll of honour, but I bet I’d forget someone. I’ll just take the opportunity to thank you, all of you.

  • poetry course Lumb Bank

    A couple of weeks ago I did an Arvon course at Lumb Bank, which I found a very challenging, but ultimately extremely rewarding experience. It was very odd to be in a house with so many other people – even Nunraw, which isn’t silent or peaceful any more didn’t make the same sort of social demands. It was also odd to be with so many people taking poetry so very seriously. You’d think the Callander poetry Festival would be the same, but it isn’t – there’s a relaxed, festive atmosphere, something to do with so many of us being friends, or with the atmosphere Sally and Ian King create, which was quite different from Lumb Bank.

    I don’t mean that it was competitive or pompous or elitist – on the contrary. Most of those who had been to Arvon weeks before remarked on how well we were getting on, and how nice everyone was. But it was very serious, and this was both strange and liberating compared with more mainstream environments where poetry is at best peripheral, if not downright irrelevant.

    Being in what felt like a very foreign country, poetically speaking, did bring out major differences between the English and the Scottish poetry scene. English poetry seems more high-brow – downright academic, in fact, at its worst, dreary, cold, contrived and cerebral. At its best it’s powerful, elegant and exquisite. It’s a sort of climax culture.From here it looks as if there’s a consensus about what they like and want from poetry, and they have evolved a system to make it more and more like that.

    Scotland, on the other hand feels like second growth scrub. Lots of weeds, lots of vigour, much more diverse and sustainable, original, slightly renegade, very much more experimental. We have much more language to play with, more different kinds of publishers and readers, much more confidence – but we could do with a bit more intellectual rigour. We have stopped looking to England for approval quite so much, and the independent voice is coming through, but our poetry needs the sort of development that traditional music has had – an awareness of the enormous potential within the form, a respect for craftsmanship and technique, and a refusal to settle for less than the best.

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